All Rise...

The Charge

Behind every successful woman is a bunch of creeps who want her job.

The Case

Call me crazy, but I enjoy the sitcom as an art form. It hasn't always been
easy, particularly when there are so few good examples when compared to the
sheer numbers that are launched every year (or used to be launched; it's not the
viable commodity it once was). But like horror movies and romantic
comedies—which both have a similar wheat-to-chaff ratio—I find even
the worst among them incredibly easy to watch and, in their own way, oddly
comforting. Maybe it's just because I grew up on so many of them, though I
suspect there's more to it than that. The landscape has been so polluted by bad
sitcoms that it's easy to forget just how respectable accomplishment a really
good sitcom is: it has to provide colorful, compelling characters, tell 22
different stories and be funny inside the economical time frame of 22 minutes.
Rail against the form all you want, but that's not easy to do.

As a sitcom fan, it's been interesting to watch the transformation that the
genre has undergone in the last decade. As more subtle, inventive and, yes,
funny single-camera shows like Arrested Development, The Office and 30 Rock hit the air and picked up devoted
followings and critical adoration, the sitcom as we had previously known it
began to feel stale and utterly out of date (with a few exceptions; CBS staples
like Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory are keeping
three-camera traditions alive). The 2000s, for the most part, have sounded the
death rattle for the traditional three-camera sitcom.

Squeezing in just under the wire is Less Than Perfect, a
largely-forgotten ABC sitcom which ran for four seasons in the early-to-mid
2000s without ever standing out, but which has nevertheless developed a cult
following over the years. As workplace sitcoms go, it's no NewsRadio. Heck, it's not even Just
Shoot Me!. It's too generic to stand out, despite a talented and colorful
cast and the occasional good joke (it doesn't hurt that future Arrested
Development creator Mitch Hurwitz is a producer). It's the kind of sitcom
where all the jokes are telegraphed by obvious set-ups, then overly punctuated
by the constant, obnoxious drone of canned laughter. Even if you couldn't speak
a word of English, you'd know exactly what was going on and where all the jokes
were—they all have that cadence and timing of sitcom jokes.

Less Than Perfect focuses on Claudia (Sara Rue, Pearl Harbor), a permanent temp serving
a life sentence for a New York-based media outlet until she's one day promoted
to assistant for the most popular news anchor in the city, Will Butler (Eric
Roberts, Depth Charge). The rest of the
cast is made up entirely of "types." There are Claude's two best
friends, sassy Ramona (Sherri Shepherd, Cellular) and oddball Owen (Andy Dick, Reality Bites), as well as her
sniveling competition on the 22nd floor: cold, sneaky Kipp (Zachary Levi, Chuck) and materialistic Lydia
(Andrea Parker, ER). The plots are all pretty familiar: Claudia struggles
at work, Claudia struggles with her evil co-workers, only to learn they're warm
and soft on the inside; Claudia tries to find love and balance a career and blah
blah blah. I kept wishing throughout the season that the show would take more
narrative chances. I guess since this is the first season, Less Than
Perfect had to find its footing first. There are very few sitcoms that
realized their full potential right out of the gate (once again, Arrested
Development is that incredibly rare beast), so I shouldn't really hold this
show to such a high standard. It's pleasant enough, but not much more.

The best reason to give Less Than Perfect a look—and what drew
me to this DVD release in the first place—is the lead performance by Sara
Rue, a character actor who toiled away for years in bit parts before finally
getting her own vehicle with this show. Of course, much was and is made about
how Rue is an "unconventional" leading lady for TV, which is really
just code for the fact that she's not the size of a typical Hollywood actress
but is actual human size. And, truth be told, she's great looking and
interesting to look at in a way that very few actresses are (of course, she
subsequently went on to lose a bunch of weight and go blonde, so that she could
look like everyone else; it worked and she did. Now she's doing ads for Weight
Watchers, and while I'm all for people being healthy I'd be lying if I said I
didn't miss the old Sara Rue—the one who had character). Like most of the
cast of the show, it takes Rue a while to find her footing; for many of the
first episodes, you can feel her anticipating and overselling the jokes. She
feels less like a TV actress and more like a student in a high school play
(she's not alone, either—Eric Roberts never gets comfortable doing comedy,
and the stunt casting shoots itself in the foot). Eventually, though, Rue finds
the character: insecure, sweet, self-deprecating, hopelessly optimistic but
always prepared for disappointment. It's a neat character for the lead of a
network sitcom, and Rue is able to play her (eventually) in a way that we
haven't quite seen before. So many things about Less Than Perfect feel
stock and familiar, but Rue isn't one of them.

All 22 episodes making up Less Than Perfect: Season One are collected
on this no-frills DVD set courtesy of Lionsgate, spread out over four discs. The
shows are presented in an anamorphic widescreen format in an aspect ratio of
1.78:1, which is a nice surprise since I didn't really think that sitcoms were
broadcasting in widescreen back in the early 2000s. The shows are colorful and
poppy and a lot of fun to look at, and the DVD transfer does a great job of
bringing that to the screen. The audio is a traditional stereo track, keeping
all the dialogue front and center and only making use of the surrounding
channels for that obnoxious, never-ending laugh track. The best thing that can
be said about it is that it does the job. There is not a single extra in the
entire DVD collection.

At the very least, it's nice to see that a show which never made much of a
splash can still get a DVD release; even an unremarkable set like this is likely
to please Less Than Perfect's cult following. And, as if the fact that
show is seeing the light of day on DVD isn't already good enough news for fans,
here's something even better: the episodes have finally been placed in their
correct production order. ABC shifted things around when originally airing the
show, and while it isn't really a series that depends on continuity (most
episodes are little closed loops), it's always a good thing when something is
set right. Less Than Perfect is hardly the highest achievement of the
sitcom form, but it is a moderately agreeable diversion that passes by with
surprising quickness and ease. It's decent at its best, hackneyed and
forgettable at its worst. At least there's Sara Rue.